Minister Faust by From (html) (best ereader for pdf txt) 📗

Festus. Then, distracted by the buzz whining in the air, he turned around to glare at André.

“Hey, it ain’me!” said the Brotherfly.

“Vut is it, Festus?”

He shook his head disgustedly. “I should’ve caught this, but with everything going on, the conspiracy, me taking care of you—I can’t keep absolutely everything under control, I never claimed to be a god, just a hardworking—”

“Festus!” snapped the Iron Lass, the syllables evoking the slash of a whip. “Vut. Is it?”

Still without looking toward her, he pointed at various monitors while electronically highlighting them.

“Here,” he said, clicking on a hexagon of a black man and an Asian man in an office. “Footage recorded several days ago. Our X-Hero’s retained legal counsel. With Tran.” He snorted heavily enough to dislodge his pancreas. “Quite a turnaround for an ambulance-chasing backstabbing barrister employed by an antisuperhero watchdog agency!”

Click. A desert canyon in searing daylight. The image scoped down to a network of drill holes. One after the other, four black baboons emerged from the holes, carrying tiny sacks and running. “Yucca Flats. The abandoned mine sites.”

“So?” said Syndi, swatting at and missing the insects buzzing in the Hollow.

“That’s where th’gubment was drillin f’argonium,” said Wally, his tabernacle voice Pavarotting my brain. “I always told ’em there hadda still be some left down there.”

I asked Festus why Kareem would send his shadow creatures to retrieve argonium.

“Who knows? A dirty bomb? Insurance against…someone who might finally bother to return to active duty? Combine that with the argonium data he downloaded…We’ve seen close-up how addictive it is. What if Edgerton could shadow-extract it or shadow-synthesize it, combine it with something else, and mass-produce it? That racist reprobate has sworn revenge for the F*O*O*J ‘denying’ him his ‘rightful place.’ What if he’s planning to drown white America in a tidal wave of argonium-crack?”

“That’s complete bullshit, Festus,” said Syndi, “and you know it!”

“Ja, Festus…Kareem may be a schwarzextremist, but still, I caun’t believe—”

“Oh no?” he said, trying and failing to swat the insect buzzing near his ear. “Then what do you make of these?”

Festus clicked several hexagons: multiple angles of Sunhawk Island and the Blue Pyramid, time-jumping imagery of a black falcon entering and later exiting the Pyramid from the aperture of the mysterious shaft on the forty-second tier.

“The Ka-Sentinels sealed the Blue Pyramid,” growled Festus, “three days after Hawk King’s death. The drones wouldn’t even let Major Ursa or the Spectacle back into the crime scene. And after the divine apparition at the funeral, no one wanted to risk trying to break in. And yet here,” he said, pointing, “we see that Edgerton’s been sending his shadows inside! For what purpose? What’s he been doing?”

Suddenly Festus hammered his fist into his console. Syndi, André, and I jumped in reaction. Festus looked down at what he’d crushed: glistening black fragments. Which then poofed into nothingness.

“That bastard! He’s been monitoring us this entire time! I should have crushed him with my bare hands!” he yelled, his voice resounding in the Hollow: BARE HANDS BARE hands barehands… Panting with rage, he muttered almost inaudibly, “But that would be messy. Gas is neater for bugs.”

A comm call came in from the Fortress of Freedom. Festus stabbed the HOLD key on his console.

I confessed to Festus that I failed to see why the situation was as dire as he seemed to think.

“How can you fail to comprehend this, Miss Brain? That fanatic’s been sending his word-things inside the Blue Pyramid! He killed Hawk King! And if he could do that to a god, how long do you think a defenseless human being could last against one of his nightmarish creations? And why murder Hawk King at all, unless he’d gone to the King under this delusional negroid–Hawk King theory, shared his plans with the King and expected support, and when the King refused him any further access to the Blue Pyramid and its technology and threatened to turn him in, or attempted to capture him right there—”

“Technology? Inside the Blue Pyramid?”

“The ancient technology inside Hawk King’s fortress, Miss Brain, could incinerate half the United States. If the X-Man were to use the Pyramid as his command and control center, he could prosecute a one-man global race war…and possibly even win it.”

Psychesituational Presentation of XTremism

Determined to go into battle immediately, Festus sketched out his strategy, accepting as-brief-as-possible interventions from Hnossi and fitting Wally with a device he called an “OM Meter” so he could monitor Wally’s health in case the X-Man had acquired sufficient supplies of argonium to pose a threat. When I pressed him quietly on the “OM Meter,” Festus conceded that he was more concerned that this “brave new Wally” was unstable, and he “refused to risk the success of the mission on the cultic conversion of any Kentucky-fried fanatic.”

The monitors beeped impatiently with the call Festus had forgotten was on hold. He tapped his keyboard, and the central hexagons of the honeycomb united into a single image: the black-furred Major Ursa, surrounded by a hundred F*O*O*Jsters, gathered inside the majestically muralled auditorium of Heroes’ Hall.

“What is it, Major?”

“Uh, well—we’ve, we’ve all been waiting for you, sir.”

“Waiting for me? What are you on about?”

“Your speech, sir—you were supposed to begin your speech ten minutes ago.”

“Speech? I’m not giving any speech, Major!”

“But you used the Alpha-One channel, you asked us to—”

“I certainly did not use the—” He stopped. His eyes grew tiny. “Major Ursa, evacuate the Fortress forthwith! Condition Red! REPEAT, EVACUATE ALL PERSONNEL FORTHWITH—”

The honeycomb flared with sound and fury, and then went null, into default blue.

Festus stammered, “Good God—even I didn’t think that madman would—”

Everyone gazed at the empty blue, dumb with horror.

Festus dialed into his hexagon-screen comm system, patching into both the Alpha and Zeta Channels.

“Ah…attention…cuh-calling all F*O*O*Jsters,” he said. “Calling all retired F*O*O*Jsters and all independents. This is an Alpha-One and Zeta-One priority message, invoked under the authority of FEMA Protocol SH Two. The Fortress of Freedom has been bombed. Everyone inside has been…everyone is presumed dead.”

“NO!” cried Syndi. “Kareem would